The picture that emerges from study of physician economic behavior is mixed, but from the intensity of responses by some professional societies to Medicare's coding modifier proposal, it appears that economic incentives matter a lot to many of their members.
This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.
AMA Journal of Ethics' editor Audiey Kao, MD, PhD, interviewed Kenneth Sands, MD, about harms to patient dignity caused by unintentional disrespect and about initiatives for measuring, tracking, and correcting such harms.
Christina Krudy, MD and Kavita Shah Arora, MD, MBE
Antenatal corticosteroids aren’t as effective in reducing neonatal mortality in low-income as high-income regions due to cultural and health care differences.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(3):261-268. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.3.stas1-1803.
The Anesthesiology Quality Institute contributes both to local quality improvement in the practice of anesthesiology through data collection and establishment of benchmarks and to patient safety in partnership with the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(3):248-252. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.3.pfor1-1503.